Polish artist Katarzyna Krakowiak is interested in uncovering the limits of architectural space. Known particularly for working with sound, she often uses it as a medium to explore monumental spaces as her installation Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers in the Polish pavilion at the 2012 Venice Biennale demonstrated. She was recently in Berlin for her show Out of Tune at the Polish Institute, and spoke to Fiona Shipwright about concert halls, junkspace and her developing interest in sounding out the city.
Interview and photos by Fiona Shipwright
You work a lot with sound, a medium that defies gravity, whilst simultaneously working in some very “heavy” spaces, physically and culturally, such as the Polish Pavilion in Venice. What is it you like about the medium?
I love the feeling that I’m taking over a space. I remember the moment when I was working inside the huge interior of a water tower and realised that by using sound I could take over a whole building without constructing anything physical. I think this idea of “taking over” is also connected to how I’m slowly moving towards urbanism in my work.
In 2013 whilst I was installing a sound piece at Penn Station Post Office in New York, I came to study how Manhattan developed from farms into streets. For me, scale always comes back to the human but I’m interested in understanding what’s going on in between. With urbanism I don’t believe in a division between outside and inside, it’s more a situation without borders – which sound can transcend.
Your show “Out of Tune” in Berlin references Rem Koolhaas’ concept of “junkspace” – the architectural debris that spills into the voids of the contemporary city and makes up its fabric. What is it about this idea that is attractive to you?
Recently I’ve been working with recordings of a single voice and considering the individual perspective. I think it’s important to be aware of the imbalance between a single voice and the city. You have a situation where the voice is trying to tune to the city but there is no communication between the two. It’s a one-way exchange but that is not necessarily a bad thing. This is our normal condition: we want to tune into, be part of something. I’ve also been working with 3D printing which I actually think generates real “junkspace”. You can print anything you want but the problem is that it produces objects – and I think that today it’s no longer about the object.
In such an image-dominated field, do you feel that communicating architectural spaces using sound can be a more arresting, effective method?
That aspect of the work is very important to me. The documentation photographs of the Polish Pavilion piece show how people really “exist” in space when they listen. They don’t really speak to each other; it’s a very individual experience. I think my work is not so much about communicating but more about understanding that we are in fact not communicating with each other. I feel this is a very important issue for architecture and is partly why I chose to present my work at the architecture, not the art, biennale.
Within an architectural context, sound is often just treated as an acoustic, problematic issue. Even the way concert hall spaces are designed for the perfect sound – it is so boring. In Poland this amazing concert hall was built recently and of course it’s a beautiful space architecturally but is the fact that its sound is “better” than other concert halls really the only thing anyone wants to talk about in terms of its acoustics?
Katarzyna Krakowiak (1980) is a sculptor, who uses sound to
explore the limits of architecture. She creates large-scale sound
sculptures involving existing buildings, often applied at 1:1
scale. Krakowiak graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Poznan in
2006, and was awarded her PhD, supervised by Miroslaw Balka, at the
Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw in 2013. Making the walls quake as if
they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers received
an Honourable Mention at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012.
krakowiak.hmfactory.com
Do you mean Szczecin Philharmonic Hall – which won the 2015 Mies van der Rohe Award?
Yes – I really love its surprising gold, kitschy heart. But the powerful sense of the building doesn’t come from its “perfect” sound. I think we should try to create more individual sounding spaces for both noise and silence. Try to imagine that you hear familiar music up in the Himalayans – because of the pressure there, the conditions, you experience it in a new way. It’s why I’m interested in the idea of junkspace but not only from the perspective Koolhaas proposed; I want to talk to people about all their experiences of different conditions and situations. I
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